Smile Power

Putting on a happy face before tackling a challenge can broaden one's awareness of possible solutions. In a study led by Kareem J. Johnson, a psychologist at Temple University in Philadelphia, 116 volunteers completed a test of their attention skills. Later, they watched one of a number of video clips known to induce various feelings. When repeating the mental test—finding small images—the people who had just expressed genuinely happy smiles, involving both mouth and eye muscles, showed significant performance gains. In a second study, people who showed more of these smiles also demonstrated increased ability to pay attention to several things without getting sidetracked by irrelevant information. "When people are in negative moods, they fixate," Johnson says. "The study showed that positive emotions help them do the opposite—see the big picture." Notably, people didn't need to be generally cheerful in order to reap these benefits; the effects resulted simply from smiling.